Winter can be tough. The cold makes being outside or traveling difficult, often resulting in many home and business owners using do-it-yourself tactics to handle snow and ice removal. Those methods usually include bags of salt, shoveling snow, and otherwise scraping the elements away from paved surfaces.

While it may seem like such practices are helping to make paved driveways, walkways, and parking lots safer for driving or walking, they might actually be ruining those surfaces. Here’s how to make sure you’re protecting your pavements — not harming them — and getting them ready for spring.

The Downsides of DIY Snow Removal

It’s relatively common knowledge that salt helps keep ice from forming during the cold winter months. That leads many business parks and homeowners to invest money in both purchasing large salt bags or paying someone to regularly disburse it on sidewalks, walkways, and throughout parking lots.

Those efforts are completed to keep pedestrians safe, but they might be doing more harm than good.

Salt and other deicing chemicals can compromise your residential or commercial pavement’s overall structure, deactivating the bonds that hold the paved surfaces together and keep them healthy. These same substances can also have a negative environmental impact, causing harm to the surrounding landscaping or creating potential hazards for the creatures and critters that call the area home.

Also, the scraping or scratching that occurs during hand shoveling or amateur snow plowing can begin to crumble a pavement’s top layer, leading to breakdowns in its protective sealcoat. This layer is meant to act as a barrier between the elements and the pavement, keeping it safe from chemicals, water, environmental factors, UV rays, and more. Holes allow water to seep in, settle beneath it, erode the foundation underneath and create potholes, sinking, cracking, and other issues.

The good news is there’s a way to prevent all of these potentially expensive problems.

Why Partner with an Expert Paving Contractor?

Paving experts have decades of experience working with all types of pavements in a variety of seasonal conditions. This means they know exactly how to work with your home or office’s concrete or asphalt surfaces to keep them cleaned up, safe for walking and driving, and ready for use at all times of the year — and do so using proper deicing and snow removal techniques so as not to harm them.

Even better, paving experts know how to diagnose issues as they arise, repair them with top-of-the-line methods, and maximize your residential or commercial paving investment. Work with a paving expert, and your paved surfaces will move seamlessly from one season to the next without requiring extensive repairs and costly services.

The Long and Short of It

You wouldn’t trust a friend to handle filling a cavity in your tooth, and you wouldn’t take legal advice from a random person you met on the subway. Big issues require professional help and attention, and it is imperative that you have an expert partner to handle them when they arise.